Fears rise as spouses of highly skilled visa holders could lose work
Deadline nears on which workers will stay in U.S. for jobs.
Sometimes, COLUMBUS — it feels as though Prashanthi Reddy’s life is just made up of deadlines and worry.
The 41-year-old mother of two and native of India is a software developer at a large local company, a job she had to leave for two months late last year to wait for her employment authorization to come through.
It did, but only for five months.
The new April deadline she’s facing could be the least of her worries, as the Trump administration considers ending the visa program that allows her and roughly 36,366 others, primarily women, to work.
Reddy, of Lewis Center, has an H-4 visa with work authorization, granted to spouses of highly skilled workers, mostly from India and China, who are holding H-1B visas and waiting for green cards.
Last fall, the Department of Homeland Security proposed changing a 2015 rule that allows H-4 spouses to work in light of the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order that Trump signed in April 2017.
A decision is slated to be made this month, Homeland Security officials say.
Ending the work-authorization program would save the federal government money because it wouldn’t have to process the forms, but employers would suffer monetary losses from losing existing H-4 employees, according to Homeland Security.
To the thousands of immigrant families who rely on both parents being able to work, losing that income could mean the difference between living paycheck to paycheck, saving for college for their children, or being able to pay for the extracurricular activities that keep their kids happy.
And not being allowed to work can cause spouses, mostly women, to lose confidence, become depressed and sometimes be stuck in domestic-violence situations without many options, said Rashi Bhatnagar, an H-4 employment advocate in Atlanta who personally benefits from the program.
While waiting for her authorization to come through, Sapna Jujare, a Columbus Northwest Side resident from India, said she spent several months and fell into a deep depression.
“I used to cry every day and fight with my husband,” she said.
Jujare received work authorization two years ago and now is employed in the IT field, where she has 14 years of experience. She said her income, combined with her husband’s, allows them and their two young children to live comfortably.
“This is not for me being selfish,” Jujare said. “I’m also contributing to the country. I’m paying taxes, everything.”
In January, the Information Technology Industry Council and other tech groups — with members such as Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — wrote a letter to the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services expressing their support for allowing H-4 visa holders to work.
The letter says such companies can’t grow the country’s economy and create American jobs without employing H-4 and H1-B workers.
Skilled workers from India and their families also face other complications.
Many came to the United States through the H-1B visa program with hopes of staying indefinitely, under the impression that they could quickly get a green card.
That’s true for many immigrant workers on H1-B visas, but not for those from India who have an approximately 70-year wait for a green card because of the large number of applicants from that country, according to a 2015 estimate by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research organization.
Indians face the longest wait of any immigrant group, with 370,000 waiting for visas in 2017 but only 10,000 are accepted each year, according to Homeland Security’s annual report.